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Comment by jurassicfoxy | Hacker News Reader

I just want to say, I love emojis. I wish there were thousands more. I love the artistry, the stylistic differences between platforms. I love the way their meaning changes with the times. I love it all.

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What annoys me is that they are unbounded. You can always add more. A script has a finite set of symbols and its relatively rare that its extended with a new symbol. It's just a job retention measure for the Unicode consortium.

They have also become an online lingua franca. You'll see this a lot on TikTok, which autotranslates captions, descriptions, and even static or dynamic text within the videos. Emojis allow users viewing these autotranslated posts to communicate to the poster in a comprehensible manner (even if that's just "this is funny" or "I love this")

Emojis are really great.

It’s a regression to hieroglyphics. Six thousand years of cultural evolution down the drain.

Hieroglyphics were (mostly) phonetic. You can do a 1:1 mapping of hieroglyphics to Ancient Greek (with a few exceptions) - Carl Sagan Videos: Cosmic Rosetta Stone - https://www.dailymotion.com/video/xeryd2

Emoji are entirely ideograms.

Technically they are pictograms, as ideograms refer to more abstract concepts (with some exceptions e.g. the representation of an ass by a peach..)

It’s both. Each emoji has a pictographic meaning as defined by Unicode, but there’s also a language that has arisen contextually on social media. For example the “painting nails” emoji may refer to painting one’s nails, but it can also mean “whatever” as in “whatever you say I’m just painting my nails”.

Or the skull emoji which has a variety of meanings relating to being metaphorically dead - “I’m dying from laughing”, “you’re fucked”, etc.

There’s also the controversy over the acceptability or not of using the sobbing emoji to represent laughter.

yes, but emojis with more complex meanings are the exceptions. The vast majority are pictograms (when considering the total number of emojis)

(nsfw-ish) There are uses of emoji related to phonetics. E.g.:

> Sometimes people will simply use the corn emoji in place of the word 'porn', too.

https://www.capitalfm.com/internet/corn-meaning-porn-explain...

Similarly rooster emoji (cock) and cat emoji (pussy) have language dependent double meanings.

https://www.threads.net/@authorjennplummer/post/C6pKkIlSPUM

It is not a regression. It is a way of encoding the incredibly nuanced human communication into dry text.

We communicate with much more than language (autistic persons excluded, as they can be blind to social cues) and many messages are open to multiple interpretations. Emojis help frame the context, which would otherwise be framed by inflexion, tone, subtle movements of tens facial muscles.

It is adaptation instead of regression really.

1) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logocentrism

2) Evolution is a biological process term, and an overloaded and ambiguous one at that. Culture is accretive and driven by social dynamics. “Cultural evolution” is literally nonsensical. This was, however, a popular way of thinking in the nineteenth century; make of that what you will.

3) kids these days amirite?

> 2) Evolution is a biological process term, and an overloaded and ambiguous one at that. Culture is accretive and driven by social dynamics. “Cultural evolution” is literally nonsensical. This was, however, a popular way of thinking in the nineteenth century; make of that what you will.

Calling things racist isn't a valid argument. Meme theory is from the 20th century, not the 19th.

> Evolution is a biological process term, and an overloaded and ambiguous one at that. Culture is accretive and driven by social dynamics. “Cultural evolution” is literally nonsensical. This was, however, a popular way of thinking in the nineteenth century; make of that what you will.

I think you might be confusing the modern understanding of cultural evolution with the 19th century (to put it plainly: racist) idea of social Darwinism. Cultural evolution is a much more recent concept that makes an analogy between the modern understanding of the transmission of genes and the transmission of ideas. The analogy is of course imperfect, but by no means "literally nonsensical". See here for a very comprehensive discussion: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/evolution-cultural/

OP made a specific claim - words represent an evolutionary progression from hieroglyphs, are therefore better, and we should go forward and not back.

I see nothing in cultural memetic theorizing (which I summarized as “culture is accretive and driven by social dynamics”) that supports that.

The term “cultural evolution” is highly unfortunate as it is one more example of humanities folk borrowing science terminology in a bid to coin some evocative word salad that will sound relevant and scientific.

Pictographs can convey way more meaning than text. Add in cultural competency (subtext etc.) and it becomes incredibly potent. Hence, memes.

> Pictographs can convey way more meaning than text. Add in cultural competency (subtext etc.) and it becomes incredibly potent. Hence, memes.

Citation needed. I think you might prove that by expressing those three sentences in pictograms, so that we can verify whether they convey "way more meaning". I have my doubts.

Let me ask, are you capable of conceiving of ideas that exist outside of linguistic representation?

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